The long-term objective of this work is to foster reduction in racial and ethnic healthcare disparities through creation of new, culturally-responsive approaches to the design of health information technologies (health IT) intended for use by lay people such as patients and members of their social network (e.g. family members, friends, neighbors). A wealth of evidence suggests that the majority of racial and ethnic healthcare disparities are not diminishing. One approach to confronting these disparities has been to develop initiatives to enhance the cultural appropriateness of healthcare. To date, these efforts have predominately focused on the cultural tailoring of provider-delivered care, healthcare systems, and health promotion campaigns. Given that 1) the importance of health IT, particularly health IT used by the patient and members of their social network, in healthcare is expanding and that 2) most technologies are embedded with strong but unrecognized cultural orientations, expanding health IT design considerations to include salient cultural dimensions may help reduce these disparities. The specific aim of this dissertation is to create a foundation for a design strategy that leads to culturally informed consumer health IT. Consumer health IT shows great promise to engage patients and members of their social network and promote their active participation in improving patients'health. A concurrent, mixed methods approach drawing on both anthropological and systems engineering methods will be taken to systematically assess culturally-diverse patients'daily routines of health information communication. Daily routines represent an essential starting point for creating culturally-informed health IT. This study will focus on one major daily routine, communication with members of their social network, as this is often essential to successful self-management but burdensome to those involved. The outcome of this study will be a systematically derived understanding of the daily health information communication routines of individuals of diverse cultural backgrounds. Such an understanding will inform where there are points of similarity and points of variability in needed functionality, and therefore, where standardization may be appropriate and where and what type of tailoring may be necessary. These empirically grounded design considerations may be used to efficiently and effectively culturally-inform the needs assessment, evaluation, and selection phases of the design process. Two lines of future work will build upon the results of this dissertation. The first will empirically assess the facility of applying these design considerations at multiple stages of the design process. The second will empirically assess the impact of culturally-informed consumer health IT guided by these design considerations on outcomes measures such as usability, use, and satisfaction. The goal of this program of research is to reduce healthcare disparities by creating systematic ways to incorporate cultural patterns of daily living as design guidance for consumer health IT. It addresses goals of national initiatives such as Health People 2010 to eliminate disparities in health care attributable to cultural differences. The work blends methods from systems engineering and anthropology to better address the needs, values, preferences and behaviors of persons with a wide range of cultural identities.